Metro Pulse/Pulp/While I Was Gone, My First Cousin Once Removed

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Two new books focus on families and their psychological (and literal) movement

by Jeanne McDonald

I came to the end of Sue Miller's most recent novel, While I Was Gone (Ballantine, $12.95) while sitting on a park bench in Huntington, W.Va., where my husband and I had three hours to kill before a book signing. Thermometers registered 91 degrees, and because we had arrived only a few hours before and had to drive on to Charleston that night, we had no hotel room, no place to shower. "This," I told my husband, "must be what it's like to be homeless."

That was an immense exaggeration, of course, but in a sense, our predicament was analogous to that of Miller's narrator, veterinarian Jo Becker, who is emotionally displaced in her own life and struggling to find her bearings. The turmoil is precipitated by the unexpected appearance of Eli Mayhew, one of five former housemates Jo lived with in Boston 30 years before, in a house where one of the young women, Dana, was savagely murdered. Jo, now wife to Daniel, a worldly minister, and mother to three independent daughters, begins to fantasize about Eli, mistaking his casual remarks as invitations to intimacy.

Despite my enormous respect for Miller's literary talents, I was unable to empathize with Jo, who adores the animals she treats but is willing to risk losing her loving husband for a fling with a man she has never really liked: "[He] was unimaginative, a little dull, certainly less free, less wild, less fascinating than we were..."

Surprisingly, in a section at the end of the book called "A Conversation with Sue Miller," even Miller admits, "I was slow to warm up to Jo as a character because I knew she was limited. I found it hard to like her." The most exciting aspect of being a novelist is to create characters, so why would Miller allow her narrator to remain unlovable? For one thing, Jo is a whiner, constantly dissatisfied: "I felt suspended, waiting. We feel this way sometimes in adolescence, too. But then there's the burning impatience for the next thing to take shape, for whatever it is we are about to become to announce itself. This was different: there was, I supposed, no next thing."

But there's more. All sorts of contradictions emerge in this novel. Why does Jo feel it necessary to lie about everything—even her name—when she moves to Boston? Why does she leave her first husband without so much as a good-bye, reconcile with him, and then leave again? And what about her second husband, Daniel? He's too complicated to be true—highly sexual one minute, deeply spiritual the next, sometimes pious, often profane. The characters lack consistency and dimension, and Eli is particularly flat and slimy. I guessed his secret at the very beginning, yet, because of the author's skill, I gasped aloud at the denouement. However, for Sue Miller at her best, I'd recommend her earlier books, like The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbotts, where the characters are much more appealing.

For appealing but skewed characters, read My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell (Harper Perennial, $13). On the back cover, author Sarah Payne Stuart grins out at the reader, looking like a mischievous Holly Hunter with a story to tell. And what a great story it is—a memoir that places Stuart smack in the middle of the eccentricities of two old New England families, the Winslows and the Lowells, who go all the way back to the Pilgrims and governors Edward and Josiah Winslow, and who, in modern times, claim as one of their own Robert Lowell, Pulitzer-prize-winning poet, anti-Vietnam war activist, and incurable manic depressive. "Manic depression was never explained to us in our youths," says Stuart, "it was just something that ran in the family, like diabetes." Stuart's mother Jackie and her brother Johnny were also victims of the disease, but, writes Stuart, "Negative emotions were to be conquered, not expressed." Then she adds, parenthetically, "My family is always marrying Lowells, beefing up the manic-depressive gene."

Yet, the family spirit is rarely dampened. "One time," recounts Stuart, "when Bobby actually was serving time as a conscientious objector, Aunt Charlotte invited Sarah to go with her to visit him." Sarah wanted to know what Charlotte would be wearing. "They had a long discussion about what one wore to prison. The next morning, dressed to a T, the sisters stood on Beacon Street, and Charlotte hailed a cab with a white-gloved hand. When the driver asked why such ladies would want to go all the way to Danbury Prison in Connecticut, Mrs. Lowell replied grandly, 'My son is staying there.'"

Stuart recounts such idiosyncrasies with humor and affection and so much writerly skill, she makes even the family's 300-year-old history seem vibrant and immediate.

Now that's good writing.